Skypoint

TWO

Rhys was glowing as she came through the door. He was standing behind the kitchen counter wearing a smile so wide he could’ve been modelling for a Warner Brothers cartoon. It had been their first day back at work, and the smile could have just been that newlywed joy of seeing her again after their first ten hours apart since the wedding ceremony. On the other hand, Rhys and Gwen might have shared the same name for only about a fortnight, but they had shared this one-bedroom flat and a lot more besides for the last four years. This wasn’t just Rhys’s glad-to-see-you smile, this was his I-can’t-wait-to-tell-you full beam.

‘Good day?’ he asked.

‘Not bad. Bit of a Weevil hunt out Splott-way, but it was just the one and it had a limp.’

The first time she had come across one of the sewer-dwelling aliens had been in a corridor of the Royal Cardiff Infirmary. She had thought it was some guy in a Halloween mask complete with five-centimetre fangs. It had then proceeded to use them to all but take the head off some poor bastard that had got in its way. But back then – little more than a year ago – she had just been a green police constable. These days the most remarkable thing about a Weevil was that this one had a limp? Yes, welcome back to the real world. Welcome back to Cardiff.

Then Rhys was kissing Gwen. And whatever it was that he was burning to tell her, he had also missed her.

‘At least you’re home on time. That’s a good start.’

‘I told Jack I had to get back to make sure I had my old man’s tea on,’ she joked.

Rhys didn’t notice. His excitement was taking over.

‘Never mind tea. We’ll eat out afterwards.’

‘After what?’

But Rhys was already grabbing his coat. ‘We’ll go to one of the restaurants on the Bay. It won’t be far.’

‘Far from where?’

‘You’ll see. We’ve got an appointment at half-six.’

Gwen shook her head and followed him out through the door. Rhys loved delivering surprises. It was one of the things she loved about him. The biggest surprise of all had been how he had put up with everything she had brought to their relationship since she’d seen that Weevil in the hospital corridor and run into Jack Harkness for the first time. And that was why she loved Rhys most of all. Because he loved her, would do anything for her, and accepted so much that no other man ever could.

Rhys didn’t put his life on the line every day to save the world from savage alien creatures washed onto Cardiff’s inter-dimensional shoreline by a rift in time and space. He managed trucks and drivers for Harwood’s Haulage. Oh, he knew about the aliens – he’d run into one or two in recent months – but he left the Men in Black routine to Jack, Owen, Toshiko, Ianto – and, of course, Gwen herself. They were Torchwood. Nevertheless, it was Rhys that was her hero.

All the same, when he was pulling up in the car park of a steel-and-glass apartment building fifteen minutes later, Gwen thought that her hero had finally cracked under the pressure.

‘You are joking,’ she said.

The sun was setting across the Bay, a sinking ball of fire that burned like napalm on the flat water and turned the dimmed glass panels of the apartment building into planes of molten Aztec gold.

The hoarding alongside the apartment building called it SkyPoint. An exclusive development of two-and three-bedroom apartments for state-of-the-art living.

Gwen wondered what on Earth constituted state-of-the-art living.

If you’re going to be anyone in Cardiff, you’re going to be at SkyPoint!

And that might be true, but she wondered how the hell Rhys thought they could possibly afford to be one of them.

But Rhys was already out of the car, looking up at the building.

‘Just look at it, Gwen. Isn’t it beautiful?’

Over the last ten years, the face of Cardiff had changed so much that, if it had been a kid, its own mother would have passed it by on the street without a second glance. If you took a look out of any high-rise window across the city, you would see almost as many cranes hanging over the place as you would skyscrapers shouldering for prominence. But Gwen had never considered any of the lean sun-flaring steel and glass giants beautiful. Impressive, for sure. Dynamic, no doubt. Welcome, too – Gwen could just remember the drab, emasculated town that had been left by the closure of the valley mines, and the loss of the docks that had distributed that black Welsh gold around the world. When the docks had gone, what had been left had been a bitter and dark spectre of what Cardiff had once been. But that now lay buried beneath these shiny new buildings and Cardiff’s spirit had been resurrected. It was once again a boom town. Perhaps that did make SkyPoint beautiful.

On the other hand, Rhys was the kind of bloke that applied the word to a blood-red six-wheel Freightliner tractor unit kitted out with so much dazzling chrome it had to be a danger to other road users.

‘There’s no way we can afford this, Rhys,’ she said. But she said it with a smile, not wanting to puncture his enthusiasm, not wanting to spoil their first proper week as newlyweds with an argument over money.

‘I’m not talking about the penthouse, love. Just a little two-bedroom apartment. Sixth floor. Doesn’t even have to have a Bay view.’

‘I like where we live now. What’s wrong with it?’

‘Nothing’s wrong with it. Except that was the old you and me. PM. Pre-Marriage. This is us AM-’

‘After Marriage. Yes I get it, Rhys. I still don’t see the point.’

‘It’s like a statement, isn’t it? Moving on. We’re going forward.’ Then he looked at her, held her hands. ‘Two bedrooms.’

Gwen raised an eyebrow and kinked one corner of her mouth. ‘You’re not talking about when you snore and I kick you out of bed, are you?’

Rhys said nothing, just raised his eyebrows a fraction, and returned her smile.

They were talking in eyebrow semaphore, and they’d only tied the knot two weeks ago. God, they were like an old married couple already. Maybe Rhys was right – they needed a new start.

‘Come on, then,’ she said, tugging him towards the building’s glass doors. ‘But we’re just looking. Maybe get some decorating ideas for our place.’

‘Whatever you say,’ he smiled.

Glass doors the colour of bonfire smoke parted before them, and they stepped into a large reception area that Gwen was surprised to find quite comfortable. She had expected to find more cold steel and glass, somewhere as sterile as Owen’s Autopsy Room back at the Hub. But the SkyPoint reception was furnished with white, greys and blacks that were at once modern and comforting. They crossed a short-pile carpet that muffled their steps and Rhys gave their name to a blonde girl in a short black skirt who sat at a low table in one corner of the reception area decorated with a sweep of colour brochures.

‘Mr and Mrs Williams,’ he said. ‘We’ve got an appointment with Mr Shaw.’

The blonde girl in the short black dress uncurled her legs and smiled at Rhys, and Gwen felt a pang of something. Not so much jealousy as proprietorial supremacy.

Rhys is all mine, love, signed and sealed, so you might as well put those legs away, for all the good they’ll do you.

The blonde whispered into the phone that sat alongside the brochures, and Rhys gave Gwen a smile as he took in the reception. Gwen noted with delight that Rhys barely looked at the girl’s legs. Was that marriage for you, or just excitement over the apartment they were going to see? A part of her wanted to tell him again that, whatever this Mr Shaw showed them, there was no way they could afford it. She had never been entirely sure who it was that signed the Torchwood pay cheques – the money just appeared in her bank account on the first of every month – but, whoever they were, the wages bore no comparison to the dangers involved in their earning. As a general rule, if you wanted to make a fortune it seemed you had to come up with another way of ending the world, not saving it.

An elevator door opened as the blonde girl put down her phone. The man that stepped out of it wasn’t the estate agent, although, immaculately groomed and dressed in black Armani, he could have been. Gwen had never laid eyes on Mr Shaw and she had never met the good-looking, lean man that stepped from the elevator – but she had seen him before. She never forgot a police file.

And there were a lot of files on Besnik Lucca. No convictions, but a whole heap of paperwork that went nowhere.

Lucca caught Gwen’s eye. He wouldn’t know her. Wouldn’t know that she used to be a cop. But there was something in that glance that made Gwen’s stomach churn. Lucca was in his early forties, the slightest threads of grey in his thick, black hair. He was tanned, worked out and moved like a man who owned the space he moved through. He looked nothing like a Weevil. But he had the same look in his dark eyes. He was a predator.

Lucca switched his glance from Gwen to the blonde girl, whose eyes were already ripping the Armani from his shoulders and tearing apart the crisp white linen beneath.

He smiled at her. He didn’t need to say anything.

The girl shivered with excitement, the way she might had his fingers teased her flesh with a sliver of ice. ‘Good evening, Mr Lucca.’

Lucca backed up his magnesium-flare smile with a wink, and the girl’s skin prickled with secret goose bumps as the man in black slid out of the building.

Gwen thought she had only met one other man that could have that kind of an effect on women, and other men. And she knew there were dark places within Jack Harkness, but they were nothing to the black pit of Besnik Lucca’s soul.

She watched the smoked-glass doors close behind Lucca and turned to the blonde. ‘Excuse me. Does that man live here?’ she asked.

The girl smiled back, thinking she knew exactly what Gwen was thinking. She couldn’t have been more wrong. ‘Mr Lucca has the penthouse,’ she said.

Gwen grabbed Rhys’s arm and started dragging him towards the door.

‘I’m sorry, Rhys. No way can we live here.’

Rhys pulled himself free.

‘What are you talking about? Why?’

‘That man. I know him.’

‘The guy in the Armani?’ And then a light went on in Rhys’s head. ‘Oh no – don’t tell me. He’s an alien. Right?’

Gwen glanced back at the blonde girl. They were halfway between her table and the sliding glass door, and she was watching them with a distracted curiosity, or perhaps she was hoping Lucca had forgotten his mobile or car keys or something and would sweep back in again. Either way, Gwen just hoped she hadn’t heard the A-word.

‘No, he’s not,’ she said, and tried to make it as forceful as she could, considering it was a whisper. ‘But he is a crook. And not just any crook, probably the biggest, most dangerous, bastard of a crook in Cardiff – if not Wales.’

Rhys looked at her, took it all in, and said, ‘So?’

‘So? What the hell do you mean, so?’

‘Gwen, you’re not a police officer any more. What does it matter what the bloke in the penthouse does for a living? Do you know what that guy on the floor below us now does?’

‘I know he isn’t Besnik Lucca. When I was on the force we had a file on him so big they needed a fork-lift to move it around. Robbery, extortion, prostitution, pornography, murder, Rhys. We were investigating him for every crime in the book.’

‘Investigating. So none of it was ever proven?’

‘Who the hell are you, his lawyer?’

‘What does it matter, Gwen? So he lives on the top floor of the block. I promise I won’t invite him to the house-warming.’

‘Rhys, the man is a killer.’

‘Gwen, there are killers in the sewers. They don’t stop me taking a crap when I need one.’

Gwen stopped dead, somehow felt a carpet being ripped from beneath her. She wanted to tell him that this was different. Instead she felt one corner of her mouth trying to curl into a smile. God, she hated it when Rhys made her smile when she didn’t want to.

And that was when the elevator doors opened again, and the estate agent walked out towards them, one hand springing out ahead of him, intent on some serious welcome-pumping.

‘Mr and Mrs Williams. I’m Brian Shaw. Welcome to SkyPoint.’

Rhys took Shaw’s hand and shook it, but his eyes were on Gwen.

Oh what the hell? We’re only looking, aren’t we?

And Gwen shook his offered hand, and smiled, pushing her worries about Lucca to the back of her mind. Sod it, she was just going to enjoy the tour. If anyone was going to burst Rhys’s bubble, less than a month into their marriage, it would be the bank manager.

Shaw led them across the reception area and into the waiting mirror-panelled elevator. He was maybe thirty-five, with sandy, swept-back hair that had started to thin at the front. He wore a dark suit over a white shirt that gleamed like a soap-powder ad, and a tie sprinkled with tiny clowns. When Gwen caught a glimpse of his cufflinks there were clowns there, too. It looked like the sort of birthday combo a girlfriend might buy her fella if he had a quirky thing about guys with red noses and baggy trousers. Brian Shaw may have been an estate agent, but maybe he was a nice guy, after all, she thought.

The elevator took them up to the tenth floor and the doors slid open with a ping that was so discreet, it could have been the sound of a pin dropping. Smiling, Brian Shaw led them out into a passageway lit with frosted-glass uplighters.

‘There are twenty-five floors. A hundred and twenty-five apartments in all,’ Shaw explained as he led them along the passageway to a black door. ‘Two-bedroom and three-bedroom, all en suite.’ The door was marked thirty-two in small unobtrusive brushed steel lettering. There were no digits on the doors, Gwen noticed; figures were maybe too gauche for SkyPoint’s understated residents.

‘Fully equipped kitchens, appointed to the highest standard,’ Shaw continued as he unlocked the door with an electronic key. ‘And as you see, security here is both discreet and practically unbreachable.’ And that was a comfort with a man on the top floor who, according to one story, deep-fried a man’s bollocks while he was still attached to them. ‘I think you’re going to be quite impressed,’ said the estate agent, and he led them into the apartment.

Rhys stepped aside with a smile and motioned for Gwen to go first. And there really was no way she could argue with Brian Shaw – she was definitely impressed. The door led directly into a massive open-plan lounge-kitchen-diner (whatever the proper estate agent speak was for that), but it wasn’t the room that took her breath away – it was the Bay that lay beyond it.

The sun was now little more than a golden crest on the horizon, the sky had turned a deep, rich scarlet, and the water sparkled beneath it like a mirror scattered with jewels. Around it, the waterside development of the city gathered, cast in partial silhouette by the evening light, like an audience for the setting sun.

She felt Rhys beside her. ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

She wanted to tell him that the spectacle made no difference – there was no way they were moving. Instead she breathed, ‘It’s beautiful.’

Behind them, Brian Shaw grinned. ‘And that’s only the view. Wait till you take a look around the apartment.’

‘Yeah, right, mate,’ said Rhys, eager as a kid with a sled on a snow-swept Saturday. ‘Show us everything.’

And Brian Shaw went into demonstrator mode. The lounge – which would easily accommodate the entirety of Gwen’s old flat – was ready-wired with a wall-mounted TV screen that doubled as a mirror and looked like you could organise a drive-in picture show around it. When Brian fired it up, the Hi-Def picture blazed, and the sound boomed from hidden speakers all around the room. Rhys made a note: the beach landing in Saving Private Ryan was going to be mega on this baby. The speakers were also hooked into a sound system that emerged from the wall at the touch of a remote-control button (and the same remote operated the TV, the powered window blinds, the dimming lights, and probably the toilet flush, for all Rhys knew).

The kitchen was no less high-tech and stylish, all black granite and chrome with halogen lights over the work surfaces that somehow knew where you were and intensified intelligently to light your chopping, mixing, or whatever else you got up to on the kitchen counters. (And sometimes Rhys and Gwen got up to stuff that wasn’t strictly speaking culinary.) The fridge was connected to the internet and could order the groceries for you, the eco-friendly washing machine measured the water it used and fed itself with detergent. The dishwasher did everything but load itself.

You got used to high-tech gear when you worked for Torchwood – it had spent a century scavenging alien technology and developing it for its own needs – but Gwen’s idea of a cutting-edge kitchen gadget was a shopping-channel gizmo for dicing onions. She wondered if Jack had maybe got some backdoor deal with a kitchenware developer manufacturing alien food-blending technology.

Then the estate agent led them through into the master bedroom. In the room they shared at the moment there was just about enough space for a double bed and one wardrobe with a rail that sagged with clothes. Gwen had a small dressing table, but she had to sit on the side of the bed to use it as there was no room for a stool. But here the superking bed was the width of a Cadillac and there was space to park another one either side. There wasn’t a wardrobe – there was a dressing room.

‘Didn’t you say you always wanted a dressing room?’ Rhys grinned.

Gwen gave him a look. Yes, she’d always wanted a dressing room and this place was fantastic – but, come on! There was still no way they could afford to live here. Unless maybe she started selling alien tech to the blender people.

Meanwhile, Brian Shaw was on the move again, sliding back a dark, frosted-glass door. ‘Through here we have the en suite wetroom, furnished in grey slate and black granite.’

The estate agent walked into the bathroom, and Gwen caught Rhys’s sleeve as he went to follow him.

‘This is madness, Rhys,’ she whispered. ‘It’s beautiful, yes, I know. But we just can’t afford any of this. We’re just wasting this man’s time.’

Rhys looked into her eyes, touched her cheek. ‘I know,’ he said softly. ‘Maybe not now. But one day. Soon. You and me, this is what we want, isn’t it? The best we can get.’

Gwen smiled at him and squeezed his hand. ‘I’ve already got that.’

He winked at her. ‘Come on. Let’s go see the granite lavvy.’

Gwen burst out laughing and Rhys led her through the frosted-glass door.

They took it in. It was – as the estate agent had said – all grey slate and black granite, with stark white fittings and chrome taps.

But there was no sign of Brian Shaw.

Rhys glanced back over his shoulder, like there was any chance at all of Shaw having slipped past him unseen. ‘Where did he go?’

The logical mechanics of Gwen’s mind, the cerebral technology that refused to give in despite all that she had seen after the last year or so, shifted a gear. ‘He must have come out when we were talking.’

And she was already out of the wetroom, calling out for the estate agent. ‘Mr Shaw?’

But there was no answering call.

Gwen swept through the flat quickly. The apartment was big, but it wasn’t that big. And Brian Shaw wasn’t in it.

She found Rhys still in the wetroom. She wasn’t sure if he was really considering the possibility that Brian Shaw had vanished down the plughole.

‘He’s not here,’ she said.

‘He must be somewhere. He walked in here not twenty seconds ahead of us. There’s no window.’

Her logic-gearing did another shift. Given that this was Cardiff, and that Cardiff was built on a tear in time and space that sometimes warped what most people took for reality, sometimes the logical explanation for the inexplicable came down to two words…

‘The Rift,’ she said.

Rhys looked at her, shook his head. ‘Oh, no. Not here?’

‘So you explain it to me, Rhys. You tell me how Brian Shaw walked into the bathroom and disappeared without so much as a flush.’

He couldn’t.

She kissed him gently.

‘What was that for?’

‘I’m sorry, Rhys. I’m going to have to go back to work.’